Isaiah4chapter 4

Isaiah 4:1

seven women shall take hold of one man: The seven women who seize one man close the war-emptied Jerusalem of chapter three, where the sword has left so few men that ordinary marriage customs collapse and seven women offer to waive a husband's usual duty of support, asking only his name to cover their reproach of childlessness. The picture is social wreckage stated as fact rather than exaggeration, and the older writers read it as the direct fruit of the judgment just pronounced. Barnes and Henry take the verse as the floor from which the chapter immediately rises into promise, the darkest point placed just before the branch of the Lord appears in the next verse.

Isaiah 4:2-3

the branch of the Lord be beautiful and glorious: The branch of the Lord names the first of several such branch texts across the book, and the older commentators divide over what branch means here: Delitzsch and Gill hear a messianic title standing parallel to the fruit of the earth in the same clause, while others read it as simply the land's produce restored after judgment, both readings held without a verdict. Whichever reading a commentator takes, the promise attaches to a named remnant, he that is left in Zion and remaineth in Jerusalem, called holy and written among the living, book-of-life language the New Testament will later use of its own citizens. The chapter turns in one verse from seven women scavenging a name to a people whose names are already recorded.

Isaiah 4:4-6

washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion: The purging of Zion's filth by the spirit of judgment and the spirit of burning is washing language for a work only the Lord does, and the older writers set it against the sacrificial washings of the law, an inward cleansing the ceremonies could only picture. What follows over Zion is the exodus canopy returned: a cloud and smoke by day and the shining of a flaming fire by night, the same double sign that led Israel out of Egypt, now covering Zion's assemblies rather than a wilderness camp. The tabernacle for a shadow from the heat and a covert from storm closes the chapter with shelter as the last word, the whole company gathered under one roof of glory.